Do you pay for YouTube premium? Options are there, but it seems like most users prefer ad supported content to paid content in many contexts.

Google Play Music is awesome. I love that I can keep my personal collection of rare MP3s there and have them in a convenient cloud player. Ad-free YouTube is just icing on the cake.

Adware based products win in the marketplace.

Google can't change that.

At least the money from those adware products goes toward deep tech r&d. It could be worse.

Unless one day they take it a step too far, and the entire tracking-based monetization scheme is banned by the government or the EU. I hope they have a backup plan other than lobbying in the opposite direction.

Why do you think they are pumping dozens of billions into cloud and especially AI? At its heart, according to the founders, Google is not a search company, and not an ad company. Their primary long term goal is the creation of real artificial intelligence. The ad business provides the money. The money buys the best people and all the infrastructure. The user-facing business provides the data. By all accounts you need a trillion dollar setup, as much talent as you can , and pretty much all the data in the world to get started.

Considering the thread about Google's Soli [0] has a huge number of votes, there's a clear sign that many are still heavily plugged into the borg. I'd suggest that even more would disagree with the suggestion that Google isn't a real tech company.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269877

The topic might be heavily upvoted, but the overall sentiment in the comments in notably negative.

Do you have an example of a “true tech company”?

Oracle fits this description nicely. :)

No that's a law firm :)

And a strip and gut, tech acquisition company.

SpaceX, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, ...

AWS is the most true tech company out there I think, I wish there were a way for me to invest in it outside of the Amazon borg cube media conglomerate trying to fight Disney.